What's happened, historically, is that as a technology diffuses into new ways of doing things, old industries simply die out, and then the new industry differentiates into replacements for it. Specialized production in the middle ages was divided into guilds (many of which are family names now): you had smiths, cobblers, bakers, butchers, weavers, etc. When the industrial revolution happened, there was simply "industry"; it was only later that this differentiated into the steel industry to replace smiths, the meatpacking industry to replace butchers, the textile industry to replace weavers, etc.
Similarly, when software got started in the 50s, there was only the "software industry". Now, 60 years later, it's differentiating into search, social, messaging, e-commerce, developer tools, homesharing, adtech, fintech, ridesharing, delivery, etc. And it's likely there's more to come: if I had to locate us in the history of the industrial revolution, I'd say we're around 1890 or 1900. At that point, the great industries of the mechanical age (mass-produced automobiles, airlines, plastics, radio, television, recorded music) had yet to be invented.
http://econweb.umd.edu/~haltiwan/dhjm_jep_5_17_2013.pdf
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2014/...
Here is the abstract of that last study:
"Business dynamism is the process by which firms continually are born, fail, expand, and contract, as some jobs are created, others are destroyed, and others still are turned over. Research has firmly established that this dynamic process is vital to productivity and sustained economic growth. Entrepreneurs play a critical role in this process, and in net job creation. But recent research shows that dynamism is slowing down. Business churning and new firm formations have been on a persistent decline during the last few decades, and the pace of net job creation has been subdued. This decline has been documented across a broad range of sectors in the U.S. economy, even in high-tech."
And here is the start of the first:
"The pace of business dynamism in the U.S. has declined over recent decades. The decline in business dynamism is evident in a pronounced declining trend in the pace of both gross job creation and gross job destruction. An important component of these declining trends has been the decline in the firm startup rate. The decline in the startup rate has yielded a significant decline in the share of employment accounted for by young firms – this share has declined by almost 30 percent over the last 30 years. "
And please, please, please note that a country can have an incredibly dynamic, innovative industry, but that nation can still be in long-term decline. See here for details:
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/if-the-usa-is-the-most-...